BREAKING NEWS

Study finds serious doubts that pre-K has long-term benefits for kids

By:
Richard Belcher
, Josh Wade

Updated: Feb 19, 2019 - 8:08 PM

Loading...

of

0

Study finds serious doubts that pre-K has long-term benefits for kids

A new study on the long-term benefits of pre-K has produced surprising -- perhaps shocking -- findings.
The Tennessee study found that students who took part in Pre-K had lower academic achievements and more disciplinary problems six years later.

“As soon as the children who hadn’t been in pre-K encountered formal schooling, they just caught right up,” Farran said.

In third grade, those without pre-K did better in math and science. By fourth, fifth and sixth grades, those without pre-K scored better in reading, math and science. And by sixth grade, the pre-K students had more major disciplinary problems.

“I am phenomenally concerned about what we may be exposing poor children to that has the opposite effect from what we intended,” Farran said.

“You can’t look at a study of another pre-K program and make generalizations about Georgia’s pre-K program,” Commissioner Amy Jacobs said.

Jacobs has run Georgia's wildly popular pre-K program for nearly five years. Unlike the program in Tennessee, Georgia's is open to children of all income levels.

Jacobs contends the differences between the states' programs make a direct comparison difficult. And she focuses on a much shorter time frame.

“Success in pre-K is making sure they’re prepared for kindergarten,” Jacobs said.

And what about looking at long-term benefits?

“There’s four years in between pre-K and third grade so you can’t just look at what happens in one year,” Jacobs said.

Jacobs said there are also other influences to consider.

“It’s not just what happens after pre-K, it’s what happens before pre-K,” Jacobs told Belcher.

But both the professor and the commissioner acknowledge that public confidence in the benefits of pre-K may be too high.

Farran recalls the earliest thinking on pre-K in the 1970s.

“Suddenly people start believing that pre-K is this answer to a very significant problem of poor children not doing well in school,” Farran said.

Belcher asked Jacobs what she would say to those who call pre-K the “silver bullet”.

“I don’t think any grade is the silver bullet,” Jacobs said. “I think what we have to talk about is does pre-K do its job. Does it prepare children for kindergarten?”

"This is an educational policy whose goal is to try to help poor children and if it isn’t meeting the goal, aren’t we obligated to figure out how to do it better?" Farran said.